Not as productive of an evening as I had hoped. I did farm some crystal lizards and finally upgraded my Sticky Longbow to +4, but it's looking less likely that I will be able to max it out this playthrough without some serious farming, and sadly, Luck is my worst stat at the moment except for maybe Intelligence. With that said, I upgraded one of my shield's fully, which was nice.

I ran into my first real roadblock in the second part of the Tower of Latria. The Red Phantom version of the Mindflayer can one-shot me with his Soul Arrow spell, it's not even using the higher tier Soul Ray which the boss of the previous area used and I could still survive through, it's just the basic version. The scary part here is that the normal Mindflayers can K.O. me with their basic non-magic attacks, so fighting this thing up close is not likely going to work either. So I'm going to have to be extra careful at trying to fight it at range.

Not helping me here is that Faith, which inexplicably controls my Magic Defense, isn't exactly a stat I use very often. So I poured a few more points into Faith, and I'm now wearing Garl Vinland'd Dark Silver Armor set since it has the best stats in my inventory for magic defense, in hopes this will give me an edge. My other issue is that servers went down as well, so no hope of getting summoned for the Old Monk fight.